From Context to Execution: How AI Agents Understand, Remember, and Act

An AI agent can reason well and still make the wrong call. Often, the problem isn’t the model. It’s what the model knows when it acts. A relationship agent needs to remember what happened the last time you met someone. A GTM agent needs to see what changed in the market this week, not last quarter. A workplace agent needs to know how the team actually gets things done. A shopping agent needs product facts and judgment that only the merchant can provide. Each case depends on context, but the context comes from different sources, changes at different speeds, and carries different risks. This panel brings together four founders working on those problems from different angles: We’ll compare how these systems capture, update, retrieve, and protect context, and ask a practical question: What does an agent need to know before we trust it to act? Panelists 🎤 Felix Meng Founder & CEO, XTrace Felix is the founder and CEO of XTrace and a Stanford alumnus. XTrace is the shared memory infrastructure for AI-native teams. XTrace captures knowledge from work that people and agents have already completed, making successful procedures, decisions, and artifacts available for reuse. His lens: How teams and agents can remember what worked, transfer that knowledge, and stop solving the same problems from scratch. 🎤 Jing Kuang Co-Founder, Cresca | Founding Partner, Y+ Ventures Jing works at the intersection of consumer AI, professional relationships, and trust. She is currently building Cresca, a private relationship memory layer that helps professionals remember who they meet and follow up with the right context. She is also the Founding Partner of Y+ Ventures and a Stanford GSB alumna. Y+ Ventures is an early-stage venture firm investing in consumer AI startups at the angel, pre-seed, and seed stages. Her lens: How personal relationship context can be captured and surfaced without giving up privacy or control. 🎤 Joe Tam Co-Founder & CTO, Upriver Co-Founder & CTO, Upriver Joe is the co-founder and CTO of Upriver. He previously worked on large-scale multimodal data and consumer products at Instagram, Google, and Spotify. Upriver gives agents real-time context on emerging trends, brands, and creators. They partner with developers automating GTM and marketing, with clients including Clay and Unify. His lens: Agents need real-time market and cultural signals to act in a relevant way for target audiences that doesn't feel generic or like slop. 🎤 Sumit Jagdale Co-Founder & CEO, Sartorial Sumit is the co-founder and CEO of Sartorial and a Northwestern alumnus. Sartorial is the brand-truth layer for agentic commerce: it turns a merchant's product catalog into structured reasoning that AI shopping agents can understand, remember, and act on across every AI surface. His lens: How an AI agent goes from finding a product to choosing it, and what context a brand must supply for that last step to happen. Moderator Stella Xiao Co-Founder, Sartorial Stella is the co-founder and GTM lead at Sartorial and a Northwestern Alumna. Previously she built the demand-generation function from zero and ran the Shopify storefront end to end for hardware tech. Agenda 2:00–2:30 PM — Check-in and networking2:30–3:40 PM — Moderated panel discussion3:40–3:50 PM — Open mic3:50–5:00 PM — Networking Who Should Attend This conversation is for: It will be especially useful if you’re working through questions like: What belongs in the prompt, the memory layer, the retrieval system, or the source application? Who gets to change it? When should it be forgotten? And when is it reliable enough to support a real action? 🔥 Limited spots. About the Host Sartorial Sartorial is the agent-native product intelligence helping brands market to AI buyers. Sartorial helps retailers and D2C brands restructure their old catalogs to be machine-readable and marketing them to AI agents to drive more sales and increase revenue as shoppers increasingly favor agentic commerce over Google search. Reach out if you're interested in collaborating, sponsoring future events, or just chatting about agentic commerce, startups, and community building! Message Stella Xiao or email [email protected] 💌 About the Sponsors XTrace XTrace is the shared brain for AI-native teams. It connects the tools your team already uses — ChatGPT, Claude, Notion, Slack, Drive, Granola — and turns them into one brain with shared intelligence. Every doc, every decision, every conversation, every AI interaction: captured, shareable, and portable across teammates and across agents. Cresca Cresca is a private AI memory layer for professional relationships. People can capture notes through voice, text, photos, and event interactions, organize them around their contacts, and bring the right context back before a meeting or follow-up. Relationship data remains private by default. Patchworks A small, intentional community of founders, investors, and builders, many of us YC and SPC alumni.